Charisma is the control of legitimacy
Charismatic leaders arise from competitions--including war and war-like sports.
The prototypical charismatic leader might be the schoolyard bully--not the biggest kid, but the kid who has that ineffable power to make everyone want to please them and do what they say.
The Invention of Competitive Politics
Large basalt statutes of Olmec leaders have them wearing ball caps.
Olemc politics may have emerged from the ball game. Olmec techniques of statecraft, like resource-gathering and diplomacy, likely developed to facilitate the rituals of the game. And the winners of the game likely took the principles of competition from the game into politics. In other words, the game created the state.
Chaokia, a violent Mississippian culture, also selected leaders based on a warlike game called chunkey.
It's not coincidental that the United States has highly competitive politics, and we tend to often choose leaders who are charismatic movie stars, sports guys, and military heroes.
Heroic Societies
Circa 1920, Hector Munro Chadwick wondered:
Why do the great traditions of epic poetry all come from people who were in contact with great urban civilizations, even employed by those urbanists, but who rejected urban values?
For example:
- Norse sagas
- Homer's Iliad and Odyssey
- the Ramayana
Chadwick called these "Heroic Societies."
They shared broad similarities:
- favoring oral storytelling over writing
- games determine status
- focus on personal debts of loyalty and vengeance
- fiefdoms instead of central authority
- competition for slaves and followers
- competition by squandering wealth (like the Potlatch)
In another example of schismogensis, these heroic societies likely defined themselves against their urban neighbors.
Other societies that resemble this pattern include:
- Kurgans,
- Kwakiutl,
- Māori, and
- Genghis Khan's Mongols.
Charisma and Legitimacy
Graeber and Wengrow aren't clear about how exactly charisma becomes a source of domination. I've made the connection to "legitimacy" in order to parallel sovereignty and bureaucracy.
This was based, in part, on an episode of Love Island on Netflix. Reality TV is perhaps the purest form of charisma competition. On this show, one particularly charismatic participant was able to control the entire narrative. Their version of events became the truth for everyone. Their charisma legitimated their view and gave them power over the other participants.